the.com/chink
A crack in armor, weaponized into a slur — proof one word can wound two ways.
means A narrow crack, gap, or opening — as in a chink in a wall or in someone's armor — though the same spelling is also a vile ethnic slur for a person of Chinese descent.
from The 'crack or gap' sense likely springs from Middle English 'chine' (a fissure or crevice), itself from Old English 'cinu,' a crack — kin to words for splitting and yawning open. The slur is a separate, much later and uglier coinage: an English mangling of 'China' or 'Chinese,' probably surfacing in 19th-century English among speakers reacting to Chinese immigration. The two senses are unrelated in root but collide grimly in spelling — one names a flaw in steel, the other was forged purely to wound.
- old english
- From a word meaning a narrow crack or gap
- armor flaw
- A chink in armor is a literal vulnerable seam
- sound word
- Also the bright clink of coins or glass
- ethnic slur
- Became a vicious anti-Asian slur in 1800s America
- two lives
- Same spelling, one harmless, one harmful
armor plate gaps — medieval knights' vulnerability between breastplate and shoulder armor where arrows could penetrate
great wall of china — cracks and gaps in the wall structure that allowed infiltration near jiayuguan in gansu province